Ongamak, which is what this piece was called, they wanted to run away, they wanted to bury themselves in the earth. The music of the pygmies of central Africa, he said, and the music of the Katchak or Monkey Dance of Bali, and the music of the temples of Nepal and Tibet, these musics do not try to be profound and they do not try to be beautiful, Massimo, he said, they do not try to be anything. They are what they are, Massimo, he said. Ils ne sont que ce qu’ils sont. The world is being swallowed up in superficiality, Massimo, he said to me, and the artists and intellectuals react to this by seeking profundity. When they grow tired of profundity they play ironically with superficiality. But they are wrong on both counts. They should not seek the depths and they should not seek the surfaces, they should seek the truth. We were allowed to pay our last respects, me and Annamaria, he said, the family allowed us to stand in the room where he lay. Annamaria was crying and holding my hand. His cheeks had sunk right in so that the bones were visible, with the skin stretched tight over them. They had not yet shaved him and his chin was covered with a fine white down. I remembered when I had carried him from the car in his blanket to sit at the edge of the forest, on one of our last outings. He weighed hardly anything. You could see the outline of his body under the sheet. I remembered what he had said to me many times: The body is nothing, Massimo, the spirit is all. What is music, Massimo, he said, except the triumph of the spirit? Even sex, he said, even sex is the triumph of the spirit. It is not the triumph of the flesh, he said, it is the triumph of the spirit. I learned this when I first learned about sex, he said, when my little cousin let me pass my hand over her lovely young breast. It was not so much the feel of her breast, he said, the feel of her firm young breast under my hand, as the sense that it was her breast I was touching, a secret part of her I was being allowed to touch. A strange ritual was being enacted, Massimo, he said, a ritual in which a magical union was being cemented. My wife did not understand this, he said. For her sex was sex and that was it, which means that for her it was nothing at all. Music is like a woman, Massimo, he said. You have to woo it and you have to be infinitely patient with it and in the end you have to recognise that you may think you have reached the heart of the sound but it will always elude you. You may hit upon a means of expressing it, but you yourself will never fully grasp what it is you have done. We sat at the edge of the wood. Night was falling but the cicadas were in full voice. I thought perhaps he had gone to sleep. He did sometimes and then I had to wait till he woke up and asked to be taken home. But then he spoke. I could not see his face because of the way he was sitting. Listen to their music, he said. Listen to the throbbing power of it. Where is the Greek or the Italian composer who has responded to this powerful music, which is, after all, there for all to hear? A few Renaissance composers seem to have been interested in cicadas. Stefano Landi wrote a madrigal about a cicada singing as it dies, and Monteverdi made a little joke out of humans imitating cicadas in one of his madrigals, he said, a delightful joke, but a joke nonetheless. But the demonic power of the song of the cicada has remained untapped by musicians. And yet when you listen to it, it is as powerful in its way as anything you will hear coming out of a Buddhist temple in Nepal or Tibet. And what is it saying, Massimo? What is it saying?